* * *
The train rolled into Makó, the last stop for both the train and the Locomotive team. They were due to play the Makó Meat-Processors that afternoon. There was a minor abattoir in Makó which helped to supply flesh to the salami factory in Szeged. Their opposition was entirely drawn from the small-bone cleaning unit of this abattoir.
No one was there to greet them at the station, but Makó wasn’t really big enough to make finding anything too much of a problem. They arrived at a school sports hall for the match to find the meat-processors out on court, clumping about in what had the appearance of a desperate attempt to learn how to play basketball half an hour before play was due to commence.
As they were changing, Hepp gave the team a pocket edition of his pre-match exhortation. It definitely wasn’t needed, since they knew without setting eyes on the meat-processors that they couldn’t be any good. Unknown, provincial teams couldn’t be any good, since any hot player would be immediately siphoned up, lured into the grasp of one of the big teams that could offer huge betterments. This was a friendly match to appraise the meat-processors, a newly formed team, who had probably lined up the first-division Locomotive via political channels. A Makó Party secretary had phoned another Party secretary to whom he had slipped a crate of salamis, who would in turn phone another Party secretary, a soon-to-be proud owner of a crate of salamis, and so on, till at the end of the chain Locomotive chugged into town.
Thus there was no need for Hepp to flex his admonitions, but the thing about Hepp, which could be quite irritating at times, was that he was a professional: he took his job seriously despite the fact that ten million other people in Hungary didn’t. He was good in every way as a coach, manager and mentor of the team, but he did have one grave fault. He always got up at 4.30 in the morning, and after fifty years on the earth, still couldn’t grasp that other people didn’t. His direst threat was circuit training at 5 a.m.
One morning, not long after he had joined Locomotive, and not long after he had burned his bed, Gyuri woke up on the floor with the awful knowledge that Hepp was expecting him at 5.30 for some track work in what was a bottomless black October freeze. Wondering why so much of existence consisted of getting up in the cold dark to do something you didn’t like, he resolved he wasn’t having it. Normally Gyuri was exemplary about training, indeed, that was why he had burned his bed, in an attempt to incinerate his laziness. It hadn’t been a great bed, but it had been serviceable, it had worked, and lying there in the mornings Gyuri had found its temptations preferable to running about in the winter. He lay there in its fortifying warmth and comfort, thinking about the training he should have been doing, repeatedly previewing it instead of doing it. Gyuri knew he had to train, and train much harder than anyone else because he was a self-made athlete, unlike someone like Pataki who was a natural. To get the rewards that accrued from basketball, Gyuri had to work.
That was why he had lugged the bed down to the courtyard and burned it with a sprinkling of petrol, to make sure that his will wouldn’t buckle in the future. The neighbours hadn’t batted an eye, because, by that point, if they hadn’t had their throats slit as they slept by Gyuri or Pataki, categorised as the crazies of the block, that was good enough for them.
Gyuri placed his hopes on a groundsheet and the floor encouraging him to get up briskly and to log a few hours’ exercise before the other preoccupations of the day. But even the floor could grow on you. And that morning, he had thought ‘you can’t rush reality’ and dived back into sleep, having written off Hepp’s proposed cross-arctic running. The doorbell rang at around six (as it would turn out). Elek, who was up, even though he had no convincing reason to be, opened the door to Hepp. Hepp handed Elek his card, which he always carried – ‘Dr Ferenc Hepp, Doctor of Sport’- and asked to be shown to Gyuri’s room. Lying, Gyuri lied reflexively that he was ill, whereupon Elek expressed surprise as Gyuri hadn’t mentioned feeling poorly the previous evening. This somehow removed the sparse vestiges of veracity from Gyuri’s statement.
‘Well,’ Hepp had said good-naturedly, ‘if you can manage to triumph over this unwellness, if you can bring your body to heel, because a hard mind makes a hard body, and get to the track in twenty minutes and do ten more laps than the others, to show this illness you’re not going to take it lying down, I think I can do you a commensurate favour: I can sign your military deferment papers.’ That had been quintessential Hepp. Other coaches would have sent someone else round to threaten him but Hepp was unwavering in doing things himself.
‘It goes without saying you’re going to win this match,’ said Hepp, ‘so I’m not going to say it. These meat-processors have undoubtedly got webbed toes and if they’re in basketball gear, it’s because they brought their mothers to help them change. I don’t want to be accused of being unreasonable, I don’t want to be the target of petulant rumblings but gentlemen, I have to insist on a twenty-point victory.
‘They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover but as far as I’m concerned that’s exactly what it’s there for – this bunch couldn’t find themselves in the dark. So I have to insist, even allowing for your not inconsiderable indolence, I have to insist on a twenty-point, no, a thirty-point margin of victory. Otherwise it’s sit-ups in the City Park on the rainiest five o’ clock in the morning that I can find.’
Hepp then erected his blackboard, which he always carried around, and chalked up a few plays, selected from his notebook as thick as a hammer-thrower’s thigh (Gyuri once glimpsed a play with a number as high as 602). This was often the hardest part of any match, paying attention to Hepp’s schemes, since, certainly when dealing with a collection of small-bone pickers, the required tactic was simply to get hold of the ball, pass it to Pataki and watch him obligingly run down the court and propel it into the basket. This was a tactic stunningly effective against all but the top three or four teams in the first division who had the brains, talent, speed or foresight to impede this model operation.
But there in Makó, it was hard to attend to Hepp’s phenomenally involved machinations. You had to put one or two into action, regardless of whether you needed to or whether there would be any benefit from using it, such as collaring a couple of points. Hepp was the coach, and basketball was better than a real job where you were expected to work for the money they didn’t give you. A certain amount of explaining away was possible – ‘Doc, the marking on Pataki was too fierce, we couldn’t use the Casino egg play…’ – but if there wasn’t some evidence of orders being obeyed, Hepp’s favourite remedy for disregard of his specially-bound leather notebook was half an hour of stadium steps and it didn’t make any difference how fit you were, your legs would become solid outposts of pain.
And of course there were times when Hepp’s scheming won matches, such as the Great Technical University Massacre, when the better team hadn’t been allowed to win because of Hepp’s plays. When the end whistle had blown, the Technical University team had stood on court, unmoving, unable to believe they had been beaten, viciously beaten, by a team five places further down in the division. But it wasn’t so much to do with the winning, as with control. Gyuri had learned from his own coaching in the gimnáziums that the greatest part of the pleasure was seeing the invisible strings pulled, relishing the remote control, like being a theatre director or a general. You wanted to recognise your handiwork.
Róka, as was the custom, went out alone onto the court with the gramophone player. They all knew that this showmanship was wasted in Makó, but this was the point of being professional amateurs – you went on with the show even if there was no one to watch, or if the spectators were too thick to appreciate it. The gramophone player was István’s. István and the gramophone player were about all that was left of the Hungarian Second Army. István had got the portable gramophone player as a present from Elek when he set off to the front in ’41. Gyuri had no idea how much it had cost, but fortunes were involved; there had been German generals who didn’t have the sort of musical rec
reation enjoyed by the Hungarian artillery lieutenant. The Hungarian Second Army, like all Hungarian armies, had the unfortunate habit of getting wiped out. István returned, flayed and dented by shrapnel, even though 200,000 other Hungarians didn’t. Even more miraculously, the gramophone player had been returned home months later by one of István’s comrades-in-arms. István had no objections to Gyuri permanently borrowing it.
Róka put on one of the jazz records, to the sound of which Locomotive trooped out and started their warm-up, bouncing around and sinking baskets. The records they performed to were all of American origin, which could have been tricky, but before they had thrown away a load of records presented to them by one of the visiting Soviet railway teams, they had steamed off the labels and refixed them on the jazz records. So the Western decadents were then camouflaged by rubrics such as ‘Lenin is Amongst Us’, ‘Our Steam Engine’, and the biggest hit ‘In the Front-Line Forest’ performed by the Song and Dance Ensemble of the Soviet Army (the original credits for the jazz had been long forgotten). Any snooping eyes would only meet estimable red cyrillic whatever the reports of their ears.
The small-bone cleaners were visibly taken aback by this. Somehow, Gyuri felt, they weren’t going to break into the big time of big-bone cleaning. One of them loped up and announced that they could only provide one referee. ‘My other uncle couldn’t come.’
A towering player, some six foot six, the Meats’ not-so-secret secret weapon, lined up with Pataki for the jump-off, pouring down a look of smug contempt on the five inches shorter Pataki. It was funny – the Meats thought they were going to win.
They were very surprised when Pataki disappeared with the ball but instead of whizzing downcourt to deposit it in the boardbank as was his wont, he passed it back to Gyuri. For a bit of fun, Gyuri tried to drop the bomb, taking a shot from under his basket at the opposition basket. Normally, this was only attempted as a desperate measure with only seconds to go before the end of a match. The odds practically blocked the ball going in but as Gyuri knew the match was Locomotive’s anyway, even if they’d only been playing two men, he had a go. The ball flew across the court and shot through the net without touching the ring or the backboard. Any experienced player would have diagnosed it as magnificent, once in a career cheek, but the Meats were flummoxed and rocketed from bucolic swagger to abject panic. Instead of piling on Pataki (not that it would have greatly hindered him) they crowded around Gyuri. After Pataki had eased his way through to ten straight dunkings as if he were practising on an empty court, the twenty points hinted to the Meats that they should keep an eye on Pataki but this was of little help. The Secret Weapon lumbered about trying to pillage passes to Pataki but he was too big an opportunity for gravity to pass up and Pataki always got higher or lower faster to pluck the ball.
Bias, the like of which none of the Locomotive players had seen, flabbergasting bias from the referee which gave the Meats impunity to foul, trip and punch, along with several completely unwarranted penalty throws, resulted in a final score of 68-32 to Locomotive. It seemed obvious that the total export capacity of Hungary ’s salami industry would be needed to thrust the Meats into the first division.
The pleasure of the good result that Hepp was looking forward to had been greatly marred by the referee’s behaviour, going for his whistle whenever someone from Locomotive neared the ball. Hepp went over to the referee to discuss the one hundred and eight infractions of correct refereeing he had noted down during the course of the match. Gyuri could tell by the look on the referee’s face that he didn’t realise that he really was going to have to go through the one hundred and eight points one by one in exacting and atomic detail.
Hepp’s persistence was one of the pillars of Locomotive’s high ranking in the league but despite all his cunning, expertise and drive, there was no way he could push Locomotive into beating the Army’s team, which had the championship trophy riveted down in its clubhouse, as there was no need to move it. The Army’s strengths were self-evident: an infinity of boons for its sporters, innumerable facilities, the ability to draft anyone they wanted and above all, the bonus that playing for the Army meant that you didn’t have to be in the Army (the real one where you didn’t eat, lived out in sub-zero temperatures and dug ditches). In fact one of the most agreeable ways of avoiding the Army – a pastime that, after bonking, was the major preoccupation for healthy young Hungarian males – was to join the Army.
The life of the Army’s basketball players, as indeed of all its sporting practitioners, was cushy. On the first day they might go as far as to show you what a rifle looked like but that was as far as military science went for the sporters. Anyone who played in the first division had a nominal job handed out by their club, the duties being mainly collecting your wages (there were also the little brown envelopes at the clubhouse containing ‘calorie money’). For example, Gyuri had visited his place of employment on numerous occasions and had learned the Morse code in the course of his railway career. In the Army, shamateurism reached full speed; the only duty that impinged on the Army’s athletes was putting on a uniform once in a while. Plus, if you were of an international standard, a high rank and a fat salary were thrust on you. Puskás, the football genius, not only had a car, but a chauffeur.
In their changing room, Locomotive were joined by their vanquished opponents. The atmosphere was not one of sporting benevolence and fraternity; the hope of obtaining some home-brewed pálinka, as often happened on trips to the provinces, was dashed. The demeanour and conduct of the small-bone boys was indisputably bunko; you would have thought they could contain their surly clod-hopping to their own changing room but they couldn’t stay away from the excitement from Budapest: ergo, there was nothing else to do that weekend in Makó except bait the Locomotive team.
The Meats had chosen Demeter as the principal subject of their attentions. Demeter was tall and aristocratic, as befitted someone who came from a long line of tall aristocrats. Whether because seven hundred years of appearances behoved him to do so, or whether it emanated from his nature, Demeter emitted a constant poise: you could imagine him being bombed and pulled out from a pile of rubble without a hair out of place. If you were wearing a dinner jacket and Demeter was stark naked, you’d still feel underdressed.
Demeter was also excessively equitable, which was why he hadn’t responded to the Meats’ unimaginative abuse. If it had been Pataki or Katona, or indeed any other member of the team on the receiving end, fugitive teeth would already have been scuttling across the floor. Why was it always the friendly matches that ended up unfriendly? thought Gyuri looking around the changing room for some handy blunt instrument such as a length of iron piping.
The universal punch-up Gyuri expected didn’t in fact come to pass. The Meats’ spokesman was working his way through a loop of observations such as ‘You think you’re pretty good, don’t you?’ and ‘You think your shit doesn’t stink, eh?’ As he was engaged in this, Demeter adjusted his tie, and then, with such purpose the movement seemed slow, administered a slap resoundingly on the spokesman’s face. Not a punch but an open-handed rebuke, without any follow up. Demeter then carried on packing up his kit-bag. The Meats flocked out in silence – rather as a martial artist was reputed to be able to summon fatal strength to one finger, so Demeter had conduited a crushing amount of contempt into that slap that had incontrovertibly spelt out their fourth-divisionness in all aspects of life. The irony was that it was Demeter who insisted on politely bidding farewell to their hosts.
They had to hunt around for Hepp before they could leave, but they located him eventually, somewhat out of breath- he had run a mile down the road pursuing the referee who had taken to his bicycle at point forty-eight. Hepp was in excellent condition for his age, indeed he was in good shape for someone twenty years younger, and he could have carried on much further had it not been for the awareness that his strictures were not being accepted constructively.
Returning to Szeged to spend the night, the bulk of Loc
omotive opted for an inspection of the town’s main square to see if there was a restaurant willing to serve them. They remembered that they had run out of a restaurant in the centre of town without paying the bill, doing a Zrinyi, as it was known in the Locomotive ranks, in memory of the great Hungarian general Miklós Zrinyi, who had rushed out of his castle, admittedly to do battle with a Turkish force that outnumbered him ten times (to be completely wiped out). They remembered they had zrinyied out of a restaurant, but having been so legless and brainless they couldn’t remember which one (they had been so inebriated only half the team could walk, and had only made good their escape by locking the staff in the kitchen). But what was the point of being away from home if you didn’t behave disgracefully? They chose the restaurant on the left hand side of the square, where having reassured the management they weren’t anything to do with water-polo they were shown to a table. ‘When I hear the word water-polo,’ said the head waiter, ‘I know it means… refurbishment, hospital, the police, a loss of teeth… years of painfui, slow recovery.’
Hepp was busy back at the hotel, writing letters about the one hundred and eight points to everyone even remotely connected with the governing of basketball and some to people who weren’t. ‘I definitely think you should write to the Ministry,’ Pataki had said, knowing that Hepp’s epistolary exertions would save the team from a few hours of post-match analysis which on previous occasions had driven people to climbing out of windows to evade Hepp.
Gyuri had gone off to the main post office to see about a phone call to Budapest. Three days before, he had been stopped in the street by a striking Swedish girl who asked for directions to the Museum of Fine Arts. The miracle of such an encounter, of a girl who was from the outside and who was good-looking, just walking up to him without any advance notice from fate, had stupefied him and he almost let her go without assaying further acquaintance. She was visiting Budapest for some youth festival organised by one of the countless peace committees but that was immaterial. She was a two-legged ticket out of Hungary and worth a four hour wait for a phone-call. Stay calm, reasoned Gyuri, stay calm for a few more days and then if she hasn’t fallen insanely in love with me, there’s always the expedient of falling at her feet, pleading for marriage, offering half of his salary for life, offering anything, to kill people she didn’t like, to beg desperately and shamelessly.
Under the Frog Page 2